Thursday, October 28, 2010

TMI Thursday

If you ask someone who has never been pregnant (and never thought about it) what happens to your body during pregnancy, their answer would go something like this... "Your stomach gets big and you puke a lot."

Oh, how I wish that was all that happened.

How I wish.

Movies leave out a lot of pregnancy symptoms. I'm not sure why, maybe because throwing up constantly is somehow a great running gag (get it? I'm funny). But the truth is that a lot of women don't spend their time running to the bathroom to hawk up breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Most of the time, when a pregnant woman runs to the bathroom, it's because she has to pee. Especially in the first trimester (which I am blessedly almost done with), pee is a big thing. You should never be out of sight of a bathroom, because you will need one as soon as it isn't available. Forget sleeping through the night... it's not uncommon for women to get up and pee two or three times.

Also? Pregnant women are full of shit, literally. Pregnancy will either make you constipated or give you diarrhea (but constipation is more common). Go to any online pregnancy community and you will find scores of women complaining about how they can't poop right. Add constipation into the mix with water retention, bloating, and gas--other common pregnancy symptoms that most people don't know about--and you've got a cranky, cranky lady.

The unending fatigue is my very favorite part of pregnancy. Considering that I had insomnia problems long before I got pregnant, I am no stranger to exhaustion, but I guess it's a real bummer for normal women who are used to working all day without feeling like they're dying of sleep madness. The best part is that pregnancy books and doctors will constantly hound you about exercise--have these people ever been pregnant? The last thing a pregnant woman wants to do after a day of school/work/housewifery is go hit the gym. She wants to take a goddamn nap.

Pregnant women have issues with food. These issues fall roughly into two categories: cravings and aversions. Most pregnant women don't actually want peanut butter with pickles, but it isn't unusual to get fixed on a particular food item. Remember my post about salty potatoes? The salty potato thing has actually passed, but only after I ate baked potatoes for dinner for like... a week.

Food aversions are more nasty. They come out of nowhere, make you sick and then you don't want to eat anything. The pregnant nose is more sensitive than the normal human nose (for some reason), and it's not unusual for food smells to make women sick. Last week, I made fried chicken for dinner, and the smell of the chicken made me gag. There was no way I could fathom eating it after that... I went to Wendy's and had a baked potato. With salt.

Since this is getting long, I'm just going to list some other symptoms no one thinks about: acne, excess saliva, round ligament pain, muscle soreness, poor circulation, varicose veins, hemorrhoids, headaches, insomnia, hot flashes.

Basically? You really don't want to be pregnant if you don't have to.

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